Even then, you have to be doing a lot of those things at the same time.marurun wrote:I really don't think games will fully, or even measurably, take advantage of quad core CPUs by the time your system is no longer top of the line. Now, if you are a Photoshop junkie, do 3D rendering, or love RayTracing (POV FTW) then the quad core might make a bit of sense, particularly if the price difference isn't much.
Now, look at the down sides. If you have 4 cores and nothing really pushes more than 2 of them, that means 2 idle cores are sitting around generating heat and using up power. Not nearly as much as a system under load, mind you, but they will still be running at some level.
Dual core kinda interests me since I'm compressing a lot of video from my Media Center PC down to xvid while I'm doing Photoshop and other stuff, but I can't think of how I would use quad-core unless Photoshop or encoders really start taking advantage of it.
